Edwards has used this phrase of a lot during the campaign, and I hear it cited
repeatedly to describe how Edwards' biography connects with his allegedly populist agenda. But is it true?
Doug Ireland says,
"not really":
He constantly says he's the "son of a mill worker," and to hear him tell it, he pulled himself up from poverty so crushing it evokes images of shoeless Li'l Abner. His "Two Americas" rally-pleaser gets much of its power from this poor-boy autobiography, but in making this tale his central campaign theme, Edwards gave his family history a cosmetic make-over, like the one he gave his name.
"The Edwardses were solidly middle class" when Johnny was growing up, according to a four-part profile of the North Carolina senator in his home state's most prestigious daily, the Raleigh News and Observer. It's true that for a few years as a young man Edwards' father worked on the floor of a Roger Milliken textile mill. But Edwards père (a lifelong Republican, like his reactionary boss) quickly climbed upward, becoming a monitor of worker productivity as a "time-study" man -- which any labor organizer in the South will tell you is a polite term for a stoolie who spies on the proletarian mill hands to get them to speed up production for the same low wages. Daddy Edwards' grassing got him promoted to supervisor, then to plant manager -- and he finally resigned to start his own business as a consultant to the textile industry. As a Boston Globe profile of Edwards put it last year, the senator never "notes that his father was part of management . . . `John was more middle class than most of us,'" says Bill Garner, a high school friend and college roommate.
